Offerpal Media Monetizing Virtual Currency Apps on Facebook

With the rise of virtual currency within social games and other applications on social networks, app developers have discovered a new way to make money: let users complete offers (that generate real CPA money for the developer) in exchange for virtual currency within the app.

Managing and optimizing these offers is exactly what Offerpal Media does. Only one year after raising money and 7 months after launching with its first Facebook application partner publisher, (fluff)Friends, Offerpal Media has 40 employees and works with some of the largest app developers, including Friends For Sale and (Lil) Green Patch.

Inside Facebook sat down with Mitch Liu, Co-Founder of Offerpal Media, to learn more about his vision for the company and how they’re working with developers on Facebook, MySpace, and other social networks.

Mitch, what is your vision for Offerpal?

Well, we originally started out trying to build our own properties, but we quickly saw a bigger opportunity in helping developers of social applications on Facebook, other social networks, and the web monetize their apps. So we switched to a platform strategy to provide a “managed offer network” for social apps. Since then, we’ve been really focused on building out our targeting technology and providing a good user experience.

Which Facebook developers have you had the most success with so far?

A couple things come to mind. We have a great relationship with Friends For Sale, where we’ve actually been running incentivized banners. The offers are customized to their app, offering ways to “get more money to buy your friends,” etc. Also, we have a great donation mechanism working with (Lil) Green Patch. Users can complete offers and a portion of the proceeds are donated to save the rainforest.

What portion of your business is inside Facebook and social networks right now?

About half of our business is actually with social websites. For example, we work with crunchyroll and integrate with their points system. Users can dress up their avatars with points they earn through our offers. We’re doing something very similar with Blake Commagere in his Vampires/monsters series of apps with Vampire Bucks, etc.

It’s possible for developers to go direct to advertisers and set up CPA deals themselves. How does Offerpal help?

Developers are pretty busy people, and don’t have time to go out and figure out which offers will work well for them. We’ve already figured out which offers work well on which platforms, and then our technology optimizes the offers for each developer.

Which offers work best on Facebook?

Funny you should ask… Actually, mobile offers work well on Facebook. Some of the softer offers, like market research, also work well. Subscriptions also work well. It varies by country – for example, our Blockbuster offer works very well in the UK.

So what kind of stats are you seeing across your network so far?

Some of our publishers are seeing very high eCPMs. The average is about $50 per 1000 daily active users, with some over $200 per 1k DAU. We’re also seeing very high completion rates of 4% – this is due to how integrated we are with the applications. Developers often see increases in page views per user per day as well.

We have about 1,000 advertisers total – about 40% are US/Canada, 30% UK/Europe, and 30% Asia.

Thanks Mitch. Any last words?

As long as there’s a compelling way to spend currency in your apps, this is a very engaging way to monetize.